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meat industry
We Don't Face Crisis of Scarcity or a Population, But a Crisis of Capitalism
We must explicitly name the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.
Jul 25, 2025
Mounting concern over declining birth rates, the devastation of the climate crisis, and a rising conservative pronatalist movement have led to a renewed focus on population. People across the political spectrum express show up on both sides of the debate, whether about the economic challenges of an aging population, our planet’s destruction (and its very real human toll), or pushing a regressive agenda.
Late last month, The New York Times published “Depopulation is Coming, Don’t Expect it to Solve Our Problems.” I read it eagerly. Economists Michael Geruso and Dean Spears do make important points. They write: “Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.” Here, here! And, in making their argument against depopulation, they also share a vision for the future where systemic barriers driving birth rates down, like the high duress placed on mothers, are no longer so prominent.
Those are great points, but they don’t tell the whole story and we need to be honest about the real crisis.
These questions bring me back to the beginning of my life’s work. The authors reference Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which argued that, if the population kept growing, humanity would implode from famine or disease due to a lack of resources. It came out when I was a young woman and took the world by storm.
When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play.
I wondered, “Is this true?” The resulting research led me to write my first book, Diet for a Small Planet (1971), which proved that our growing population was not the problem. Instead, concerns over scarcity—at least in the realm of food—pointed to a larger culprit: Concentrated corporate power and extreme economic inequality which together promoted meat-centered diets.
In a moment when population is again in the limelight and meat-based diets are increasingly valorized, I want to return to the argument I made then. It feels more important than ever.
About three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land is devoted to livestock that provide only about 11% of our calories. And just four corporations—JBS, Tyson Foods, and Cargill, and National Beef—control over three-quarters of the global beef market. In pork, three firms account for two-thirds.
We can see concentrated power still hard at work here. Meat is the most inefficient way to feed ourselves.
Here’s the key point: Meat production is not only wasteful, it’s incredibly destructive. For one, it furthers destruction of carbon-absorbing rainforests while adding cattle-emitting methane—a particularly intense greenhouse gas. According to one report, “Cows pack such a punch that, if they were a nation, ‘cow country’ would rank as the world’s sixth worst greenhouse gas emitter.” And, tragically, cattle farming alone is responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation.
These mega-corporations—with their substantial hold on the meat market—have no real reason to slow or stop their production; instead, they profit, while we bear the brunt of the destruction.
Let’s return to the question of population. We know that the meat industry—as one of the big drivers of our climate crisis—is a huge part of creating scarcity-based depopulation rhetoric. At the same time, we know that depopulation is no longer an idea simply made mainstream by Ehrlich et al., but a reality driven by declining birth rates.
The decline in birth rates is a phenomenon across the West, but the U.S. has a distinct landscape. In a 40-country comparison, we come in 38th—third worst—for childcare affordability. For single parents in the United States, a gargantuan 32% of income is spent on childcare. According to The Guardian, in Massachusetts, infant care costs almost $27,000 per year on average--“21% more than the average rent, and 83% more than in-state tuition at a public college.”
While the cost of childcare is mind-boggling, it’s not a stand-alone issue: We are in a full-blown cost of living crisis. The U.S.’ median income is just over $80,000 a year, yet to live comfortably in Mississippi—the U.S.’s most affordable state--a family of four would need to make around $190,000 in 2025. All of this in a nation where the richest 1% of Americans make 139 times as much as the bottom 20%.
When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play. This means explicitly naming the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.
We face neither a crisis of scarcity nor a crisis of population. Rather, we face a crisis of capitalism.
The solution is a democratic economy with rules against monopoly and an adequate safety net that provides the resources we all need to thrive.
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My "Beef" with Bobby: On the Trouble With RFK Jr.
If Kennedy really wants to “Make America Healthy Again,” he could instead start by addressing the dangers of red and processed meats, a concern grounded in science.
Jan 28, 2025
Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has triggered controversy. Many have rightly criticized his ongoing anti-vaccine messaging. He’s also erroneously claimed that antidepressants were linked to school shootings, among other falsities.
Despite this all, his confirmation seems likely. So, let us prepare.
Kennedy promises to take on ultra-processed foods. He has alerted Americans that their over-consumption is linked to multiple maladies, from diabetes to heart disease. He also advocates banning them from school lunches.
On this, I say, “Right on, Bobby!”
The American diet poses great risks, including its heavy reliance on ultra-processed foods. They are one reason for our shockingly low international health and health-system ranking—way down at 69th. Unfortunately, RFK’s tendency to mislead carries over to this issue. It’s already clear that his campaign against ultra-processed food is not evidence-based. For example, he falsely claims seed oils (sunflower and canola) are harmful.
If confirmed, RFK Jr. will oversee the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), giving him power to regulate our food industry as well as a much-broader mandate: “to safeguard the food supply.”
If Kennedy really wants to “Make America Healthy Again,” he could instead start by addressing the dangers of red and processed meats, a concern grounded in science. The World Health Organization identifies red meat as a probable carcinogen and processed meat a carcinogen. Likewise, a meta-analysis of 148 studies reveals that red meat—especially processed meat—contributes to higher risks for a range of cancers.
Crucially, today’s definition of “food-borne illnesses” contains a serious oversight: the deadly diseases linked to red meat and processed meats. We have a right to be outraged that the FDA still fails to require warning labels or otherwise alert the public to this serious harm. The recently proposed front-of-package labels for saturated fats, sodium, and sugar would be a first step, but we cannot stop there.
Perhaps most troubling, the agency has enabled ultra-processed meats—hot dogs or bologna—to be fed to our children at our schools. Loose guidelines also allow mega-food corporations like Kraft Heinz to introduce ultra-processed products like Lunchables in school cafeterias. Sadly, for many children, school meals are their main source of nutrition. We need to do better by them.
This crisis also reflects the political power of the meat industry. Therefore, RFK Jr. must stand up to this pernicious interest group, which “spent more than $10 million on political contributions and lobbying efforts in 2023,” which for some, “was an all-time high,” reports the Missouri Independent.
Over more than 50 years, a number of my books, starting with Diet for a Small Planet, have focused on the needless waste, ecological destruction, and hunger built into our grain-fed-meat-centered diets—all driven by the highly concentrated power of corporate agribusiness. I have stressed the health benefits of plant-based diets.
The great news is that diets rich in whole grains, legumes, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts—with little or no red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and refined grains—can lengthen our lives. A much-cited 2001 National Institute of Health study predicted that avoiding meat contributes to lifestyles that could add ten years to one’s life. Even if one began this healthier diet as late as age 60, life-expectancy increases over eight years for women and almost nine years for men.
To enable access to wholesome diets, Kennedy must also do his part to tackle the growing crisis of “food deserts”—low-income, urban areas where at least a third of residents live a mile or more from a supermarket. This barrier to healthy diets affects over 40 millions of us. The HHS will oversee the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which inform key programs such as SNAP and the National School Lunch Program. Here, we must urge RFK Jr. to focus on the science: processed meats are dangerous.
In all this, we must remain vigilant in holding Kennedy and the broader Trump administration accountable. We must also work for political reforms to ensure our elected officials are no longer corrupted by private interests. Our fight to protect our community’s health goes hand-in-hand with our fight for democracy.
Every bite we eat is a choice for the world we want. So, let’s push the incoming head of the HHS to ensure that all Americans are able to take healthy, wholesome bites.
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Outraged Over False Claims of Pet Eating? Consider the True Horrors of Factory Farms
What we do to billions of animals legally in the U.S. food system is far more extensive, not to mention ghastly, than much of the animal sacrifices that may occur in other people’s religious rituals.
Oct 13, 2024
The stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets have been debunked. Even the woman who filed a police report accusing Haitian migrants of stealing her cat apologized when she later found her cat in her own basement. Sadly, despite being proven false, the damage from these unfounded claims has been severe. Haitians living in Springfield have been subject to hate crimes and threats from people who believe the lie and have coupled their outrage with bigotry to terrorize a community of migrants who are living and working legally in the community through the Temporary Protective Status designation.
Despite the fact that there is no substantiation for the stories, a friend tried to convince me that Haitians are really, truly eating cats and dogs. The evidence, he insisted, came from police bodycam footage. As it turned out, the footage he was talking about was from an arrest of a woman—who was not Haitian—in another part of Ohio who allegedly killed and ate a cat. This woman was born and raised in America and apparently has a mental health disorder. When I pointed these facts out to my friend, he still didn’t acknowledge his error. Instead, he sent me a description of Vodou (aka Voodoo), a religion practiced by many Haitians, which included descriptions of animal sacrifice. He wrote that it would be better if this religion died out and its immigrant practitioners assimilated into American culture.
Perhaps this particularly pernicious and bigoted moment in our polarized society could be a wake-up call to become a bit more introspective and cultivate some moral consistency in how we treat others.
My head was spinning. There were so many ways I could respond. Should I focus on helping him to acknowledge that his original claim was false? Should I point out that his Irish family and my Jewish family were vilified for their cultural differences when they came to this country and invite him to reflect upon his negative judgments about newer immigrants? Should I talk about the range of religious injunctions, not confined to Vodou, which cause harm to animals? I didn’t know where to begin.
Because we’d discussed animal cruelty many times in the past, after mentioning all the points above, I further responded that what we do to billions of animals legally in the U.S. food system is far more extensive, not to mention ghastly, than much of the animal sacrifices that may occur in other people’s religious rituals. Moreover, I pointed out, he was an enthusiastic participant in the cruelty we inflict on cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals raised for food because he regularly consumes meat, dairy, and eggs. Until now, he’d never expressed much concern about the welfare of animals, often telling me that he cares more about people than animals. Suddenly, along with millions of other Americans who erroneously believe Haitians are eating dogs and cats, he claims to care a lot.
In our culture, most people recoil at the thought of eating dogs and cats and believe it would be wrong to do so. But if it’s wrong to eat dogs and cats, then how is it right to eat pigs—known to be as or more intelligent than dogs—or to consume cows and chickens, both able to feel pain just as acutely as cats and cockatiels do? If we look inward to consider who we eat, we may discover justifications but little disgust or moral outrage.
And yet, the abuse we inflict upon billions of farmed animals each year is on a scale nearly unimaginable. For example, dairy cows in the United States are forced to produce a calf every year, and when they are born, the newborns are taken away from their distraught mothers on their first day of life. We then take the milk meant for the calves for ourselves. The cows are then forced to produce 5 to 10 times the amount of milk they would naturally produce to feed their young, resulting in mastitis, a painful udder infection necessitating antibiotic treatment in about half the dairy cows in the United States. After years of this cycle of artificial insemination, birth, and perpetual milking, their milk production declines. At that point, the cows are sent to slaughter, usually to become hamburger or processed meat.
What about chickens and turkeys, whose names we hurl as an insult of cowardice (for the former) and stupidity (for the latter) even though these birds are brave and intelligent? Almost all of them live the entirety of their lives in crowded, ammonia-saturated buildings; are debeaked without painkillers to prevent them from pecking each other to death in their confinement; and, if they are being used for egg production, are likely caged so tightly they cannot even stretch a wing.
Where is the outrage? Where is the disgust? In her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, psychologist Melanie Joy describes the invisible belief system, which she calls carnism, that leads us to eat certain animals while protecting others. It is this invisible belief system that explains our horror at the thought of people eating pets—a horror we might conceivably express around the dinner table as we gnaw on the rib of a pig or the wing of a hen.
I’d like to hope that the false accusations made against Haitian migrants will help us realize the glass houses we’re living in so that we stop throwing stones. Perhaps this particularly pernicious and bigoted moment in our polarized society could be a wake-up call to become a bit more introspective and cultivate some moral consistency in how we treat others. And then maybe we’ll each take a step toward minimizing the harm we cause humans and nonhumans alike.
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